Can I take my own backup whenever I want

Yes, whenever you want, as often as you want. The panel generates a full account backup or a partial one on demand, and nothing about the platform's own schedule stops you keeping your own copies alongside it.

Full or partial

• Full account backup produces one archive with files, databases, email accounts, and account settings. It is the right thing before a migration or a major change.
• Partial lets you take just the home directory, or just one database. Faster, smaller, and usually what you want for a routine copy.

A database on its own is the most valuable partial backup for most sites, because it is the part that cannot be rebuilt from a theme and a plugin list.

Download it, do not leave it

A backup generated into your account sits on the same disk as the site. It counts against your space, and it survives exactly the failures that a second copy on the same disk survives, which is very few.

Generate, download, delete from the account. The step people skip is the third one, and it is why accounts fill up with archives from moves that happened two years ago.

When to take one

Not on a rigid schedule, but at the moments where the risk is real:

• Before a plugin or platform update on anything that matters.
• Before handing access to someone new.
• Before a migration, on both ends.
• Periodically for content you could not recreate, whatever period matches how often it changes.

A copy taken before a change is worth more than a dozen taken afterwards, because it is the only one you know is clean.

Automating it

If taking copies manually is not going to happen, schedule it. A cron job that dumps a database and pushes it to storage you control turns a good intention into something that runs whether or not you remember. Scheduling across many sites without stacking the jobs is covered in scheduling cron across many sites.

Test one restore

A backup nobody has restored is an assumption. Once, on a site that does not matter, take one of your copies and put it back somewhere. The exercise usually reveals something small and important, such as a database credential that does not match or a missing configuration file.

Doing that once a year is enough to know the copies are real. What the platform's own backups cover, and what they do not, is in what your backups actually cover.